The Mayangna (/məˈjæŋnə/ mə-YANG-nə), also known as the Ulwa, are an Indigenous people who live on the eastern coasts of Nicaragua and Honduras, an area commonly known as the Mosquito Coast. They are sometimes referred to as the Sumu (or Sumo), a derogatory name historically used by the Miskito people. Their culture is closer to that of the indigenous peoples of Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia, than to the Mesoamerican cultures to the north. The Mayangna inhabited much of the Mosquito Coast in the 16th century. Since then, they have become more marginalized following the emergence of the Miskito as a regional power.

The Mayangna today are divided into the Panamahka, Tawahka and Ulwa ethno-linguistic subgroups. They live primarily in remote settlements on the rivers Coco, Waspuk, Pispis and Bocay in north-eastern Nicaragua, as well as on the Patuca across the border in Honduras and far to the south along the Río Grande de Matagalpa. The isolation of these communities has allowed the Mayagna to preserve their language and culture away from the assimilatory impulses of both the larger Miskito group, who live closer to the Atlantic coastline, and the ‘Spaniards’ (as the Mayangna still refer to the Spanish-speaking Mestizos who form the ethnic majority population of Nicaragua), who are for the most part confined to the larger towns in the region that the Mayangna inhabit.

The Ulwa community in Nicaragua is an integral part of the Mayagna, Panamahka, and Ulwa family. They are predominantly located in the Karawala settlement within the Rio Grande basin of Matagalpa. Established since 1853, this indigenous group holds great significance, comprising approximately 3500 individuals.

The evidence provided by an analysis of the Misumalpan language family, to which the Mayangna languages belong and which also includes Miskito and the extinct Matagalpan and Cacaopera tongues once spoken in the Nicaraguan highlands and southern El Salvador, indicates the continuous presence of these groups in the region from around 2000BC. In fact, until the migration from southern Mexico of tribes speaking Oto-Manguean languages who arrived on the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua in the ninth century AD and the Nahua groups from even further north that followed, Misumalpan languages were probably spoken across the whole of Nicaragua.

In the seventeenth century the British, rather than the Spaniards, established a presence in the eastern regions of what are now Nicaragua and Honduras. When they arrived on the Caribbean coast in the 1630s, it appears that the Mayangna were divided into at least nine different sub-tribes, whose territories stretched from the southern Atlantic Coast far into the interior of Nicaragua, as evidenced by the preponderance of Mayangna-language place-names that survive across this region. But it was a different indigenous group who profited from friendly contact with the new European arrivals. Sometimes posited as a coastal-dwelling Mayangna sub-tribe, but given their distinctive language more likely to have been a related Misumalpan group, the Miskito people, who appear to have originally lived on the northern Atlantic Coast around Cabo Gracias a Dios, are an interesting example of people who grew through culture-contact on the Coast, and whose ethnic identity and even racial composition is intimately intertwined with their position as intermediaries in the relations between the Europeans and the other Indigenous living in the region, who also included the Pech and the now much reduced but previously widespread Rama in the far south.

The Miskito acquired firearms as a result of their lucrative trading arrangements with the Europeans, and through their position as allies of the British in their prolonged conflict with the Spanish. The Mayangna tribes and the Miskito had always raided as well as traded with one another, but the new weapons tipped the local balance of power firmly in the direction of the latter. Miskito raids into the interior carried away increasing numbers of (primarily Mayangna) captives, of whom the women were kept and the men sold on to the British to work the growing Jamaican plantations. Augmented by this new influx of women into their communities, as well as by the absorption of escaped or ship-wrecked African slaves, the Miskito population boomed and this formerly small tribe soon emerged as the politically and demographically dominant local power, a fact already acknowledged by the British in 1660 when they crowned a chieftain called Oldman as the ‘Miskito King,’ recognising him and his descendants as the legitimate authorities on the coast.

In the eighteenth century the Spanish managed to penetrate the central Nicaraguan highlands, where they converted and permanently settled many of the indigenous Matagalpas. However, these attempts were made difficult by the resistance of the neighbouring Mayangna groups who constantly raided the new communities, sometimes in conjunction with Miskito war parties. In the same period, the Mayangna themselves also increasingly succumbed to the better-armed Miskito raiders, and began a steady retreat into the interior, towards the headwaters of the rivers along which most of the groups had originally lived. Contrary to the assumptions of some scholars, this did not mean that the Mayangna totally cut themselves off from the outside world, and while those who remained in coastal areas were often forced to pay tribute to the Miskito King, even the more isolated Mayangna communities formed an integral part of regional trading networks, and through their access to the highest quality tropical hardwoods controlled the production and sale of the canoes that -ironically - were used against them by the Miskito in their slaving expeditions.

The Mayangna population continued to decline after the British gave up their claim to the Mosquito Coast in 1860, due to the combined effects of disease, internecine warfare, and assimilationist pressures from both Miskito and the new Nicaraguan state. From a possible pre-contact total of more than 30,000, by 1862 only around 5-6000 remained. The final blow for the Mayangna came at the beginning of the twentieth century with their conversion to Christianity, a task undertaken by missionaries from the Moravian Church, who arrived in the region from Germany in 1847 but only began to make a real impact on the native population after the departure of the British. During the so-called ‘Great Awakening’ of the 1880s much of the Miskito population converted to the new faith en masse, and buoyed by this success the Moravians increasingly turned their attention to the Mayangna. Just as the Catholic missionaries of the colonial era had done throughout the Spanish Empire, this first involved persuading the Mayangna, who up to this point had lived in dispersed family groupings and had continued to observe a traditional and often semi-nomadic lifestyle based on hunting, fishing and a shifting agriculture, to come together and settle permanently in new, compact and accessible communities, centred around a church.